The Cosmic Computer Part 18

"Oh, I stopped carrying a gun; I'm a city man, now. n.o.body carries one in Storisende. Won't even be necessary in Litchfield before long. Our new marshal had a regular reign of terror in Tramptown for a few days, and you wouldn't know the place. Wade, here, is acting mayor now."

They went back to talking about the new company. "You're going to have so many companies you won't be able to to keep track of them before long," Conn said.

"Well, I'm doing something about that. A holding company; Trisystem Investments, Ltd.; you're a non-office-holding stockholder in that, too."

Merlin was now a political issue. A bill had been introduced in Parliament to amend the Abandoned Property Act of 867 and nationalize Merlin, when and if discovered and regardless by whom. The support seemed to come from an extremist minority; everybody else, including the Administration, was opposed to it. There was considerable acrimony, however, on the propositions: 1) that Merlin was too important to the prosperity of Poictesme to become a private monopoly; and 2) that Merlin was too important, etc., to become a political football and patronage plum.

It was discovered, after they were half a.s.sembled, that the controls for the _Harriet Barne_ would only work while she was in a horizontal position. The whole thing had to be torn out and rebuilt. There was also trouble with the air-and-water recycling system. The _City of Nefert.i.ti_ came in from Aton for Odin; Rodney Maxwell was almost frantic because they hadn't gotten together a cargo of medical stores from the first hospital to be opened.

"There's all sorts of stuff," he was fuming, by screen. "Stuff that's in short supply anywhere and that we could get good prices for off-planet. Get Federation sols for it, too."

"The _City of Asgard_ will be along in six months," Conn said. "You can have a real cargo a.s.sembled by then. You can make arrangements in advance to dispose of it on Terra or Baldur or Marduk."

"There are a couple of other companies interested in interplanetary s.h.i.+ps now," his father added. "One of them had gotten four old freighters off Mothball Row, and they're tearing them down and cannibalizing them into one s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. That work's being done here at Storisende s.p.a.ceport. And another company has gotten t.i.tle to a couple of old office buildings and has a gang at work dismantling them for the structural steel. I think they're going to build a real s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p."

That wasn't anything to worry about either. The _Harriet Barne_ was better than half finished. There was a collapsium plant at Storisende s.p.a.ceport, but Yves Jacquemont said it was only half the size of the one at Barathrum; it would be three months before it could produce armor for one, let alone both, s.h.i.+ps.

The crackpots were getting into the act, now, too. A spirit medium on the continent of Acaire, to the north, had produced a communication purporting to originate with a deceased Third Force Staff officer, now in the Spirit World. There was considerable detail, all ludicrous to Conn's professional ear. And a fanatic in one of the small towns on the west coast was quoting the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavadgita to prove that if Merlin were ever found, Divine vengeance in a spectacular form would fall not only on Poictesme but on the entire Galaxy.

The s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p that was building at Storisende got into the news; on-screen, it appeared that the work was progressing rapidly. So was the work of demolis.h.i.+ng a block of empty buildings to get girders for the second s.h.i.+p, on which work had not yet been started. The one under construction seemed to be of cruciform design, like an old-fas.h.i.+oned pre-contragravity winged airplane. The design puzzled everybody at Barathrum. Yves Jacquemont thought that perhaps there would be decks in the cross-arm which would be used when the s.h.i.+p was running on combined lift and drive.

"Well, till we can get a s.h.i.+pyard going on Koshchei and build some real s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, there are going to be some rare-looking objects traveling around the Alpha System. I wonder what the next one's going to look like--a flying sky-sc.r.a.per?" Conn said.

"What I wonder," Yves Jacquemont replied, "is where all the old interplanetary s.h.i.+ps got to. There must have been hundreds of them running back and forth from here to Janicot and Koshchei and Jurgen and Horvendile during the War. They must have gone somewhere."

"Couldn't they all have been fitted with Dillingham hyperdrive engines and used in the evacuation?"

"Possible. But the average interplanetary s.h.i.+p isn't very big; five hundred to seven-fifty feet in diameter. One of those things couldn't carry more than a couple of hundred people, after you put in all the supplies and the hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats and so on for a four- to six-month voyage. I can't see the economy of altering anything that small for interstellar work. Why, the smallest of these tramp freighters that come in here will run about fifteen hundred feet."

They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure.

And there certainly weren't any of them left on Poictesme. He puzzled over it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things to think about.

In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work, everything he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had not given to anything since cramming for examinations at the University.

There was a lot of it.

The fourth planet of Alpha Gartner was older than Poictesme; geologists claimed that it was the oldest thing, the sun excepted, in the system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn't been captured from either Beta or Gamma when the three stars had been much closer together. It had certainly been formed at a much higher temperature than Janicot or Poictesme or Jurgen or Horvendile. For better than a billion years, it had been molten-hot, and it had lost most of its lighter elements in gaseous form along with its primary atmosphere, leaving little to form a light-rock crust. All that had remained had been a core of almost pure iron and a mantle that was mostly high-grade iron ore.

The same process had gone on, as it cooled, as on any Terra-size planet. After the surface had started to congeal, gases, mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, had come up to form a secondary atmosphere, the water vapor forming a cloud envelope, condensing, and sending down rain that returned immediately as steam. Solar radiations and electric discharges broke some of that into oxygen and hydrogen; most of the hydrogen escaped into s.p.a.ce. Finally, the surface cooled further and the rain no longer steamed off.

The whole planet started to rust. It had been rusting, slowly, for the billion or so years that had followed, and almost all the free oxygen had become locked in iron oxide. The air was almost pure carbon dioxide. It would have been different if life had ever appeared on Koshchei, but apparently the right amino acids never a.s.sembled. Some attempts had been made to introduce vegetation after the colonization of Poictesme, but they had all failed.

Men went to Koshchei; they worked out of doors in oxygen helmets, and lived in airtight domes and generated their own oxygen. There had been mines, and smelters, and blast furnaces and steel mills. And there had been s.h.i.+pyards, where hypers.h.i.+ps up to three thousand feet had been built. They had all been abandoned when the War had ended; they were waiting there, on an empty, lifeless planet. Some of them had been built by the Third Fleet-Army Force during the War; most of them dated back almost a century before that, to the original industrial boom.

All of them could be claimed under the Abandoned Property Act of 867, since all had been taken over by the Federation, and the original owners, or their heirs, compensated.

And there was the matter of selecting a crew. As an influential non-office-holding stockholder in all the companies involved, Conn Maxwell, of course, would represent them. He would also serve as astrogator. Clyde Nichols would command the s.h.i.+p in atmosphere, and act as first mate in s.p.a.ce. Mack Vibart would be chief engineer at all times. Yves Jacquemont would be first officer under Nichols, and captain outside atmosphere. They had three real s.p.a.ce crewmen, named Roddell, Youtsko and O'Keefe, who had been in Storisende jail as a result of a riotous binge when their s.h.i.+p had lifted out, six months before. The rest of the company--Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, Charley Gatworth, Mohammed Matsui, and four other engineers, Ludvyckson, Gomez, Karanja and Retief--rated as ordinary s.p.a.cemen for the trip, and would do most of the exploration work after landing.

They got the controls put up; they would work in either position. The engines were lifted in and placed. Conn finished the robo-pilot and the astrogational computers and saw them installed. The air-and-water recycling system went in. The collapsium armor went on. In the news-screen, they saw the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p at Storisende still far from half finished, with swarms of heavy-duty lifters and contragravity machiners around it, and a set of landing-stands, on which the second s.h.i.+p was to be built, in the process of construction.

A tramp hypers.p.a.ce freighter landed at Storisende, the _Andromeda_, five months from Terra, with a cargo of general merchandise. Rodney Maxwell and Wade Lucas had a.s.sembled a cargo of medicines and hospital equipment which they thought could be sold profitably. They began d.i.c.kering with the owner-captain of the hypers.h.i.+p.

A farm-tramp down in the tobacco country to the south, evidently ignorant that the former commander of the Third Force was still alive, had proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Foxx Travis and was forbidding everybody, on pain of court-martial and firing squad, from meddling with Merlin. And an evangelist in the west was declaring that Merlin was really Satan in mechanical shape.

The _Harriet Barne_ was finished. The first test, lifting her to three hundred miles, turning her bow-up, and taking her another thousand miles, had been a success. They brought her back and set her down in the middle of the crater, and began getting the supplies aboard. Kurt Fawzi, Klem Zareff, Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin and the others flew over from Force Command. Sylvie Jacquemont came from Litchfield, and so did Wade Lucas, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardes and a number of others. Neither Conn's mother nor sister came.

"I don't know what's the matter with those two," Sylvie told him.

"They always seem to be sc.r.a.pping with each other now, and the only thing they can agree on is that you and your father ought to stop whatever you're doing, right away. Your mother can't adjust to your father being a big Storisende businessman, and she says he'll lose every centisol he has and both of you will probably go to jail, and then she's afraid you will find Merlin, and Flora's sure you and your father are swindling everybody on the planet."

"Sylvie, I had no idea things would be like that," he told her contritely. "I wish I hadn't suggested that you stay there, now."

"Oh, it isn't so bad, so far. Your mother and I get along all right when Flora isn't there, and Flora and I get along when your mother isn't around. Mealtimes aren't much fun, though."

His father came out from Storisende, looked the s.h.i.+p over, and seemed relieved.

"I'm glad you're ready to get off," he said. "You know this hypers.p.a.ce freighter, the _Andromeda_? Some private group in Storisende has chartered her. She's loading supplies now. I have a private detective agency, Barton-Ma.s.sarra, trying to find out where's she's going. I think you'd better get this s.h.i.+p off, right away."

"We have everything aboard, all the supplies and everything,"

Jacquemont told him. "We can lift off tonight."

III

The s.h.i.+p lurched slightly. In the outside screens, the lights around, the crowd that was waving good-bye, and the floor of the crater began receding. The sound pickups were full of cheering, and the boom of a big gun at one of the top batteries, and the recorded and amplified music of a band playing the traditional "s.p.a.cemen's Hymn."

"It's been a long time since I heard that played in earnest,"

Jacquemont said. "Well, we're off to see the Wizard."

The lights dwindled and merged into a tiny circle in the darkness of the crater. The music died away; the cannon shots became a faint throbbing. Finally, there was silence, and only the stars above and the dark land and the starlit sea below. After a long while a sunset glow, six hours past on Barathrum, appeared in the west, behind the now appreciable curvature of the planet.

"Stand by for s.h.i.+ft to vertical," Captain Nichols called, his voice echoing from PA-outlets through the s.h.i.+p.

"Ready for s.h.i.+ft, Captain Nichols," Jacquemont reported from the duplicate-control panel.

Conn went to the after bulkhead, leaning his back against it. "Ready here, Captain," he said.

Other voices took it up. Lights winked on the control panels.

"s.h.i.+fting over," Nichols said. "Your s.h.i.+p now, Captain Jacquemont."

"Thank you, Mr. Nichols."

The deck began to tilt, and then he was lying on his back, his feet against the side of the control room, which had altered its shape and dimensions. There was a jar as the drive went on in line with the new direction of the lift and the s.h.i.+p began accelerating. He got to his feet, and he and Charley Gatworth went to the astrogational computer and began checking the data and setting the course for the point in s.p.a.ce at which Koshchei would be in a hundred and sixty hours.

"Course set, Captain," he reported to Jacquemont, after a while.

A couple of lights winked on the control panel. There was nothing more to do but watch Poictesme dwindle behind, and listen to the newscasts, and take turns talking to friends on the planet.